


America's Captain

by avulle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Inspired by American Gods, Magical Realism, Maybe - Freeform, i guess, i mean obviously, of a sort, two thousand words of avulle talking at the reader with no actual plot or story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 21:29:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11929653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/avulle/pseuds/avulle
Summary: Everyone knows the story.Captain America (what was his name again?), attained superhuman strength and superhuman agility through honest scientific achievement that has never been successfully replicated.  He fought for freedom—for Truth, Justice, and The American Way—against enemies that were more monster than man.  When we finally believed ourselves safe, and the war won, our enemies attempted to strike one last devastating blow, and our Captain sacrificed himself to save our nation.We believed him dead, but by chance and by miracle, he was frozen and preserved before the cold could kill him, and arose once more, when we needed him most, no weaker for his seventy years frozen in ice.Everyone knows the story.(That doesn’t make it true.)





	America's Captain

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, so this story was totally inspired by American Gods. But it was really mostly inspired by the idea behind American Gods (because the idea is just so spectacular) than the actual content, which I hadn't read before I wrote this. The writing style I believe was also cribbed off of Gaiman (I believe). I think I may have written this after re-reading Good Omens, for the like fiftieth time, but I don't actually remember. I wrote this story probably upwards of a year ago? I wanted to get back into posting here, and this is probably the best of the huge number of scraps I have hidden in my Google Docs folders, so I decided to clean this one up and put it up. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy it. I'm pretty proud of it.

Everyone knows the story.

Captain America (what was his name again?), attained superhuman strength and superhuman agility through honest scientific achievement that has never been successfully replicated.  He fought for freedom—for Truth, Justice, and The American Way—against enemies that were more monster than man.  When we finally believed ourselves safe, and the war won, our enemies attempted to strike one last devastating blow, and our Captain sacrificed himself to save our nation.

We believed him dead, but by chance and by miracle, he was frozen and preserved before the cold could kill him, and arose once more, when we needed him most, no weaker for his seventy years frozen in ice.

Everyone knows the story.

(That doesn’t make it true.)

 

The beginnings of it are true enough, of course (if a bit sparse on the details).

Captain America did indeed go down with the ship that was to bring death and destruction to his homeland.  He did not quite do it with a smile on his face—too human, with too much waiting for him at his metaphorical home—but he did do it with pride.  He was _Captain_ _America_ —a moniker that had been forced upon him that he only then felt that he could possibly deserve.   It was only _right_ for Captain America to die for his country.  And even if he could have exchanged his life for another one of his countryman’s, he knew he would not.  (This is the important part, you see.  His acceptance of his role.  But we will get to that later.)   He was going to do his country proud.

He was dead before he hit the water.  A stray metal siding that had been shaken loose, crashing into him with the force of a freight train.  His head was nearly cleaved from his body, and his spinal cord was severed instantly.  Let us at least take comfort in the fact that Captain America (for he was not yet America’s Captain, America’s Hero, America’s  _ heart  _ and  _ soul _ ) barely even noticed he was dead.  He felt a twinge in the back of his neck, perhaps, and then nothing.

Had it struck even two feet lower, this would be a different story, indeed.  It would have been much harder for him to accept that he had not died had he watched his body slowly bleed out from a severed abdomen.  (He had enough trouble with his resurrection as it was.)

After that, the story is once again mostly correct.  His body was indeed consumed by deep, dark arctic, and (who knows) had he not already been dead, he may have even been miraculously preserved alive before the cold water could kill him.  (Well, actually, he couldn’t have.  Not even Captain America, with super soldier serum pumping through his veins, thicker than water.  But we can hope, anyways.  There is nothing wrong with hoping for the impossible—and not everything is impossible, forever.)

Seventy years passed, with his body frozen in the arctic waters—far deeper than any man had ever been.  Far deeper than any man could ever dig.  Even with all the technology of the early 21st century, his body should have still been irretrievable.  He should have remained lost to the world for another century, at least.

But he didn’t remained lost.  He was found, instead.  In the year 2002, but we’ll get back to that later.

Now, while he was frozen, deep in the arctic ice, the world continued on without him.  In small ways, and in big ways.  With the war won—the greatest, most devastating war in human history that America survived without a scratch—America ascended.  With Europe and Asia in tatters, and Africa still suffering under the weight two centuries of bondage, America had no equal.  It rose and it rose and it rose.  (There is the small matter of the USSR, but it is gone by the time of the Captain’s return, so we can ignore it, for the moment.)

And as it rose, America told stories of a hero.  Of a captain.  Of  _ Captain America _ .

Their country’s heart and soul (or so they told, and so it became true), who died to protect them.  Died for everything they stand for.

_ Captain America _ , they called him.  Even in his funeral, led by somber men in all the more somber suits (with a single somber woman in the most somber suit of them all)—

_ Captain America _ .

Eventually, the meaning changed—no longer a callsign thought up by USO girls, cute and effective, but a full and complete descriptor.

Not just Captain America, but—

America’s  _ Captain _ .

For seventy years, America chanted it—all but forgetting the man (what was his name again?), but never forgetting the legend.  ( _ Captain America _ .)

Words have meaning, you see.  Great and powerful meaning.

There is significance to them.  There is  _ power _ to them.

(Power is granted to those they describe.)

He was the  _ heart _ and  _ soul _ of America, and America was far from dead.

(So, just like that, so was its Captain.)

Deep in the Arctic ice, sometime around 1956, the legends and stories reached a breaking point (with the seventh Captain America comic book, but that is neither here nor there), and Captain America’s head sewed itself back onto his shoulders.  His spinal cord became whole once more, and any evidence of his grievous wound vanished, like they had never been.  (And, perhaps, it never had been—history rewritten to match the whims of its people.) 

So Captain America’s story became truth.  So the impossible came to be.  (So the power of words, the power of belief, warped reality to suit its needs.)  All was set to rights, once more.  The United States’ arctic project went from an abjectly futile effort to just a mostly futile effort.  (A mostly futile effort that was ensured to eventually bear fruit.)

However, the Captain remained buried.  Buried under miles and miles of ice—far beyond the reaches of man.

The reason for this is simple: The United States did not need a found Captain—they no longer needed someone to fight their battles for them.

What they needed instead was a martyr.  A hero, lost to the last, desperate wiles of the enemy.  Someone who gave them unity, and purpose, in a world that was increasingly morally gray.  (In a world that was increasingly under their power.)

No, in 1956 the United States did not want for power.  They wanted for solidarity, and the Captain provided that better lost than found.

So, the Captain remained buried.  Through the Korean war, the Vietnam war.  Though the cold war and all the small, terrible wars it spawned—the Captain remained silently buried.  (The Captain remained silently lost.)

But it was not to last forever.  In 1992, as the wall fell and USSR fell with it, the Captain began to rise.  Slowly, you understand—he would still not be found for another decade—but surely.  Foot by foot, mile by mile, the Captain rose from the depths no man would ever reach to the depths a man could reach, if he stretched just far enough.

There was a storm brewing on the horizon, and America would need its Captain to greet it.  (How America knew this no one knows, but it seemed to know it just the same.  Across the country, many wonderful and terrible things began to occur—a series of events that would eventually form a defense against an enemy stronger than anything the world had ever known.)

We all know what happens next.

In 2002, a SHIELD team dug just a little bit further than they had ever dug, and struck upon a hardened shield of vibranium.  The leader of SHIELD (Nick Fury, although not the first to bear that name) was called to the Arctic, and came with a man by the name of Phil Coulson.  Together, they watched their nation’s most decorated hero be brought out of the ice, and back to the realm of the living.

One may think that they thought this a joyous occasion, and many histories ( _ all _ histories), indeed, surely record it as such, but in the moment, Nick Fury and Phil Coulson did not think it a joyous occasion at all.  They instead watched with a sort of muted horror, both men too smart and too well read to so easily believe the fantasy they would tell for the rest of their days.

A dead man, brought to life.  Miraculously, just as the superhuman crisis was reaching its peak.  America’s Captain (America’s hero, America’s heart and soul)  _ found _ .

There was little, indeed, to be celebrated because the only viable reason for this was singular: that America now needed the power of its avatar more than it needed the solidarity his death provided it.

And that was a terrifying thought indeed.

Both men lost a great deal of sleep for the next several years, as the Captain adjusted himself to modern life, and inserted himself into the American crises of the day.  His return fractured the country more than it had already been fractured, and his existence as a real, living, human being, with thoughts and opinions all his own, shattered the illusions that had been built up around his death, and the solidarity those illusions had built around them.

Their job, for these long years, was to repair the damage he so accidentally wrought, while attempting to avert the crises he had been sent to them to  _ overcome _ .  (It never occurred to them that Captain America could be more than a weapon.  Had it, we may have avoided a great deal of strife, indeed.)

Then, finally, it came.  The end of the world, or something close to it.

Or, more relevant to our story—the end of America, or something close to it.  (America still believed itself to be the center of the world, and so it was.)

This is not of great interest to us, however, because we already know how it ends.  Captain America and his Avengers won.  They stopped the end of the world.  All returned to something approaching normality.

And that’s the end of the story, right?

The world (America), returned to peace.

The world (America), safe.

Right?

 

There is a reason for this fantasy we tell ourselves.  That Captain America is no more than a man, and that he survived only what a man (albeit one greater than us all) could survive.  We tell ourselves he is not our country brought to life, although we have more than enough evidence to know that he is.

There is a reason for this—

Because if Captain America is indeed America’s avatar.  If he is indeed America brought to life, and if he only exists when America needs the strength of its avatar, then—

Well, then we’re not safe, after all.

Then the we have not returned to peace, after all.

After all, Captain America still walks the earth.

America still needs its avatar’s power more than it needs the solidarity of his symbol.

If we believe this, if we do not allow ourselves to be led astray from the story we tell ourselves, then there are still storm clouds, gathering on the horizon.

 

So instead, let us forget the truth.  Let us forget that Captain America only exists when America itself is in great peril, and that he exists now.  Let us leave this thinking to those who can handle it, who are already handling it.

Let us believe the fantasy—that Captain America is just a man, that he miraculously survived seventy years in ice, and that we were just lucky for him to have returned to us in our time of need.

Let us believe that Captain America will live, from now on, in times of both peace and war, that he will grow old, that he will die, and that he will do it without embodying the slow death of our nation.

Let us believe that Captain America will be given power over his own destiny, and not eternally controlled by the whims of his people.

Let us believe this.

It isn’t true, but let’s believe it anyways, because If we believe it hard enough and for long enough—

It may just become true.

(After all, it’s happened before.)

**Author's Note:**

> I'm also on [tumblr](https://avulle.tumblr.com/).


End file.
